System and method for ensuring accurate reimbursement for travel expenses

a technology of accurate reimbursement and reimbursement, applied in the field of computing systems for ensuring can solve the problems of increasing the opportunities for inaccurate reimbursement requests, unable to detect innocent errors and fraud, and unable to accurately reimburse travel expenses, etc., to achieve accurate reimbursement of travel expenses.

US20120209640A1Inactive Publication Date: 2012-08-16BIZ TRAVEL SOLUTIONS
18 Cites 35 Cited by

Patent Information

Authority / Receiving Office
US · United States
Current Assignee / Owner
Publication Date
2012-08-16
Estimated Expiration
Not applicable · inactive patent

Smart Images

  • Figure 1
    Figure 1
  • Figure 2
    Figure 2
  • Figure 3
    Figure 3
Patent Text Reader

Abstract

An Expense Verification System (EVS) checks for fraud / errors in reimbursement requests. The EVS stores rules for reimbursement in accordance with company policies. The EVS receives travel reservation records for auditing, parses the records to identify a reference number, and then obtains from a trusted source travel record data for a corresponding reference number. Trusted data is compared to company policy-specific rules to determine compliance. In one embodiment, an extracted fare basis identifier is compared to lists of permitted and / or prohibited fare basis codes in the rules to determine compliance. In another embodiment, data is extracted from acknowledgment receipt records from a trusted data source and extracted booking and travel dates are compared to the rules to determine compliance. The EVS issues an alert in the event of non-compliance.
Need to check novelty before this filing date? Find Prior Art

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

[0001] This application is a continuation-in-part of U.S. application Ser. No. 12 / 433,371, filed Apr. 30, 2009, which claims the benefit of priority under 35 U.S.C. §119(e) of U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 61 / 165,037, filed Mar. 31, 2009, and is a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12 / 133,863, filed Jun. 5, 2008, which is a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11 / 419,643, filed May 22, 2006, which claims the benefit of priority under 35 U.S.C. §119(e) of U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60 / 682,995, filed May 20, 2005, the entire disclosures of all of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference.FIELD OF THE INVENTION

[0002] The present invention relates generally to computing systems for ensuring accurate reimbursement for travel expenses.DISCUSSION OF RELATED ART

[0003] Reimbursement of travel expenses is a costly expense for corporations, employers, and other entities (collectively re...

Examples

Embodiment Construction

[0024]A system and method are provided for ensuring accurate reimbursement by a company for travel expenses submitted for reimbursement by a traveler. Further, the system and method are provided for detecting fraud, errors and / or non-compliance with applicable reimbursement policies. Accordingly, the system is capable of ensuring accurate reimbursement by employers for travel expenses captured by employee expense reports, such as for travel expenses commonly incurred in connection with routine business activities.

[0025]The present invention may be understood with reference to the exemplary simplified network environment 10 of FIG. 1. As shown in FIG. 1, the exemplary networked environment 10 includes an Expense Verification System (EVS) 100 in accordance with the present invention. The EVS includes conventional computing hardware but is specially-configured with special-purpose software in accordance with the present invention to provide a particular special-purpose machine configur...